Humble Adam Vegetable Pants

Learning something new is a crushing experience.  It’s embarrassing.  It humbles you.  It reminds you that you’re pretty much worthless, and it makes you feel inferior to those who have polished skills.  It’s easier just to do what you’re comfortable with, because until you actually try something new, you can sit comfortably on the sideline, watch the experts, and go, “Well, good for them; I could do that too, I just don’t want to.”

Once you dive in, though, once you really decide to give something new a shot, you take a risk.  And that’s really scary.  It’s scary because when you try something new there will be moments when you sacrifice your ego, and it’s inescapable that at some point you’ll be made to look and feel foolish. 

I’m trying to learn something new, and I had forgotten just how humbling the learning curve can be.  Currently I have a bag of frozen peas in both of my pant legs. There are two bulbous lumps under my biker shorts just above my knees where I’ve stuffed my vegan contraband.  I like frozen peas, but not so much in this capacity.  I’ve put the peas under my shorts so that they stay mashed against my upper leg.  Presumably, this will keep the swelling down.   And while I’m proud of my ingenuity (ice is hard to come by in the UAE, so I’ve supplemented frozen veggies for ice bags) - I’m not particularly proud of my twin injuries. 

I might not be able to walk tomorrow, but if I do endeavor to move about come morning, I have a sneaky suspicion that my gait will lack its standard swagger.  Words like “hobble” and “shuffle” come to mind.  Assuming I do manage to hoist my aching body out of bed, I foresee myself limping into the kitchen, walking right past my normal pit stop at the Golden-Graham cabinet, and heading straight for the freezer where I will retrieve two new bags of fresh frozen peas to stuff into my dress pants before heading to work.

That’s probably what will happen, so I’m trying to figure out how exactly I should explain these two lumpy bulges jutting from my thighs to my extremely-limited-English-vocabulary students tomorrow.  They’ll surely point to the protuberance on my lower torso and ask “Why, Mr. Adam!?”  And how will I explain?  Mr. Adam – He uh..Peas in his pants… That won’t work, will it?  Anyway, it looks more like poops in pants with these bulgy bags. 

I’ve taken up a new sport here in the UAE.  Actually, I’ve taken up a slew of new activities – but the hobby responsible for my currently-worthless legs is Gaelic Football.  Like I said before, learning a new skill is a humbling experience.  Tonight at my first practice, I pulled a muscle in my thigh.  Maybe the word pulled doesn’t accurately describe the incident.  It was more like someone ripped my muscle into shreds and simultaneously tied the pieces into white-hot knots.  I puréed a muscle in my thigh?  I liquefied a muscle in my thigh maybe?

Speaking of settings on your blender, let me explain what Gaelic football looks like, because I bet you’re wondering; It looks like someone dropped soccer, kickball, volleyball, and American Football into a blender and then poured it out onto a 100-yard pitch of greenery.  It’s a really tasty game.

I didn’t even know the sport existed until some of my new friends from Ireland invited me to their tournament in Dubai where they said they’d be playing teams from Oman, Yemen, and the like. After absorbing that first game, I was hooked.  It was a beautiful match - running, kicking, passing, jumping, tackling, blocking.  It involved a host of skills I had used in other sports, and I decided at that moment that I was going to learn this new thing.  It couldn't be that hard. When the match was over I asked if I could join the team, and got a heavily-accented, “Aye, lad.  D’be great ta have yeh!”   

So tonight I commenced my first real practice with the group of 15 lads who, in true Irish fashion, are all named Michael, except for the two whose names are also Michael but who go by Mick. 

Less than a minute into the scrimmage, I sprinted up the field and tried to kick the ball mid-stride.  It was mid-kick when I thoroughly blended the muscles in my right thigh, all but disabling that leg.  The running kick wasn’t a movement any of my previous athletic training had prepared me for, and my body retaliated immediately.  Hit the showers, Showalter! My body shrieked at me from just above my knee.  Turn it in, buddy.  You’re done! The pain was not the kind I could ignore.

I heard my body’s cries, but I was determined not to listen. I wasn’t going to let Michael and Michael and Mick and Michael and Mick think that the new guy was a winy arse, so I kept going. I pushed through the pain and ran all over that damn field on my one good leg: frequently falling down, sweating profusely, letting my man score, turning the ball over, and making a thorough mockery of my former athletic prowess.  I had forgotten just how humbling the learning process could be. 

The whole practice was excruciating.  Every step I managed to lurch out of my seething leg was agonizing – but I kept going.  With only five minutes of scrimmaging left, I started to see a light at the end of the tunnel (an MRI perhaps).  The practice was almost over! So. Close.  But when a loose ball rolled my way and I hobbled violently after it, an eerily familiar pain shot through my only good leg – my left leg.  Maybe I’d overworked it in an effort to compensate for the futility in my right leg, or maybe it’s time to admit that both of my legs are about as durable as the cardboard roll inside holiday-wrapping paper.  But for whatever reason, I perfectly mirrored my first injury on my second leg.  Enter not one, but two bags of frozen peas.

Right now my legs are so stiff and tight that I don’t want to move them.  Unfortunately, I know that’s what I need to do.  I need to get up and stretch out the muscles – to elevate my legs and bend them at the knees, to pull my heels up to my butt and stretch.  But that’s going to hurt and I’m scared to.  My legs are cramped and tight.  Any rotation is going to crush me.  I know I need to forge through this pain and take my aching legs out of their comfort zones though, and the longer I wait to do this, the more rigid and stiff they are going to get. 

With a strained muscle, here's how the pain manifests - If I wait until tomorrow to try and forge through this pain and get my legs to do something they don’t want to do, they’re going to be even stiffer than they are now.  So I’ll probably decide to wait another day.  And on the next day, they’ll be even worse, so I’ll put it off again.  The next day they will be even worse, so I'll surely delay the pain of stretching them again - ad infinitum until my legs are practically cement. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.  

Learning something new is a humbling experience.  Just a month ago I stood on a white-sand beach in Dubai holding my sleek, new skim board.  I’d never ridden a skim board before, but I wanted to learn.  I worked up my courage, purchased one at an outfitter, and took it to a beach in Dubai.   Standing barefoot in the sand with that board’s orangish hue glistening under my arm, my sun-bleached hair, and my desert tan, I felt cool.  I really did.  I knew as long as I remained statuesque, I was a sight to behold - a regular Dubai beach boy.

However, I knew once I made my first move, and commenced the learning process, my aesthetic appeal was going to catch the first wave out to sea.  I considered playing it safe.  Maybe, I thought, I should just walk up and down the beach with my board and look cool for whoever is watching me. 

And who was watching me were these beautiful Italian girls in thong bikinis lounging nearby.  They were all sipping drinks with umbrellas in them, and I kept catching them peeking over top the pages of their magazines to look my way.  For the time being, I felt rather enchanting with my California-guy vibe.  But alas I hadn’t come to impress severely underdressed ladies; I had come to acquire a new skill, an experience which would turn out to be, like all learning experiences, a devastating one.

I untucked the board from beneath my arm, and held it with both hands just like I’d seen guys do on TV.  I took a deep breath, waited for a good wave to retreat back into the ocean - and then I took off running.  I dropped the board in the shallows, mid sprint, and jumped upward, as if to mount it.  One foot landed on the board.  Success!  But not so fast – the other foot failed to make contact with anything other than my rapidly descending face right before it plunged into the sandy water.  I did a couple of awkward looking summersaults when my momentum refused to let me stop, and the board continued its solitary journey down the beach without me, leaving my awkward body to wobble around like a soggy pretzel in the shallows. 

I quickly bounced back up to check and make sure no one had seen me, and by “no one” I mean the Italian ladies attired in tightly stretched shoestrings.  Sure enough, they had been watching, and all of their beautiful Italian eyes began to trickle back down to the glossy pages of their gossip mags.  Goodbye, beach boy façade.  Learning sucks.    

In my former life I was more of a teacher than a learner.  I taught kids how to write during the school day, and in the evenings I taught guitar lessons.  On the weekends and during the summers I went to the lake and taught my friends how to wakeboard.  I was good at some stuff, so I shared my knowledge with others.

I got hired to come to the UAE to teach too, but it turns out that here I'm more of a learner.  I’m living on a learning curve.  I’m learning how to survive in a new country.  I’m learning how to navigate new roads with new rules.   I’m learning how to teach a new subject to a foreign culture.  I’m learning how to ride a different kind of board on an unfamiliar body of water.  And in case you forgot about my legs that are currently frostbitten and garnished with peas - I’m learning to play Gaelic football. 

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Do one thing every day that scares you,” and I think I’m doing that.  I’m trying things I’ve never tried before.  I’m taking social risks and initiating conversations with people I would have been scared to talk with before.  I’m eating new foods and playing new sports.  All of this stuff scares me - but you know what?  It's completely reinvigorated me - and I’ve never felt more alive.  Before I embarked on this journey, I could feel myself getting stagnant.  But now that I've made camp on the learning curve, I'm reenergized - authentically engaged in life.  

It’s unfortunate that as we get older, we get proud.  And when we get proud, we choose to avoid all situations that could dampen our garish pride.  We avoid all that scary business Eleanor Roosevelt was talking about, because we might be made to look foolish if we try something we’re not already good at. So we play it safe.  We continue doing what we are comfortable with. We don’t put ourselves through that initial pain of learning something new. It could be too embarrassing, too humbling.  And, of course, it is embarrassing and humbling, but it's also necessary in order to avoid an existential life cramp.  Here's what I mean -

Consider my aching, stiff legs.  Right now I would be much more comfortable just to leave them how they are – perfectly straight with no weight on them.  Getting them to move into a new position is going to be painful.  What they want to do is cramp up and stay cramped.  I’m going to have to make these legs do some things they’re scared to do soon.  I’m going to have to force them through some pain.  I need to walk on them, stretch them out, and put them in uncomfortable situations.  I need to coerce them into exiting the comfort zone. If I don’t do that, they’re just going to get tighter and tighter.  And the longer I wait to stretch them out, the tighter they'll get.  And the tighter they get, the less likely I will be to stretch them out.  It's that perpetual cycle. 

And that’s how people are.  If we don’t force ourselves to forge headfirst into the pain that comes from learning something new, we become rigid and stiff - cemented in our old ways.  And the longer we wait to try something new the stiffer we become, and suddenly it feels impossible to unstick ourselves and learn something fresh. 

The longer you stick to what-you-know, the harder it is to venture into the realm of what-you-don’t-know.  If you don’t force yourself through the initial pain and get out of your comfort zone today, tomorrow you will find yourself stiffer and more set in your ways, just like my leg muscles. Because of the increased rigidity, you'll put it off for another day.  The next day will be even harder, and you’ll be even stiffer, so you’ll delay doing it again. On the next day you’ll feel even more inflexible – ad infinitum until you die and rigor mortis sets in.  Then your stiffness becomes eternal. 

That’s a bit dramatic, but you get the point. 

The only way to avoid a life-cramp is to push yourself through some pain.  To do something new and end up with frozen peas stuck up under your pants or to crumple into a wet mess in front of scantily clad babes that you’d rather try to impress.  To talk with new people and risk looking like a fool.  To try new foods and drive on new roads. And sure, it’s easier to sit on the sidelines, do what you’ve always done, and laugh at the foolish looking people who are taking risks and making mistakes, but that kind of existential stiffness is the kind that no amount of frozen peas can fix.